RPGs get a bad rap sometimes, what with their tendency to demand you stop the plot and spend at least three hours grinding to make your party stronger before you can so much as tickle the next boss. Chris and Daniel Johnson have done their best to not only streamline this, but also make it appealing, by turning powering up your party into a puzzle in their turn-basedretro-styled gameThe Cave of Ātman. Your party of heroes has descended into the titular cave, where every floor is filled with monsters... but you can't just mindlessly start hacking away. As the tutorial will show you, each level is a puzzle. Click a hero to select them, then again anywhere that highlights blue to move them there. Once they've moved, red squares will show your attack range, or you can click them again to cancel your move. The catch is that your attacking hero has to be of equal or greater level (displayed with a number on the sprite) of the enemy they're trying to wallop. When you destroy an enemy, its aura will drop and slide a space (vanishing if it hits an obstacle or lands in a hole!), and any character that picks it up by moving over it goes up a level. Oh, and did I mention each character can only move and attack once per stage? As a result, every move you make and monster you slay needs to be carefully plotted out.

With pitch-perfect old school music by Hayden Davenport and some clean yet cute as a button pixel graphics, The Cave of Ātman is easy on the eyes and the ears, though some tracks are short enough that their loop can render them annoying. Though the game starts easy, as different heroes with attack restrictions are introduced and more obstacles crop up, things get more challenging without ever feeling like they become overcomplex in the process. Chances are you'll find that it still takes a long time to build up to anything that'll stymie you for longer than a moment or two, largely because the difficulty curve seems to go up and down like a wave for most of the game. The biggest challenge might actually be that the tutorial simply doesn't go over anything other than the bare basics, so you're left to figure out how each hero works on their own, or, for example, that two auras can be combined into a more powerful one. Some players will actually enjoy having to puzzle out the mechanics, however, and will find The Cave of Ātman a clever, if simple, little game that knows how to make the most out of very little. The ability to undo a single move rather than being forced to restart an entire level would have been nice, but for fans of strategic turn-based puzzling, The Cave of Ātman is well worth firing up.

On another note, I'd like to have seen a greater variety of enemies. Perhaps there could be enemy types, for example, that attack and kill lower-leveled heroes foolish enough to stop next to them. Or enemies that move in a predetermined pattern, one step every turn.

Y'know, to be blunt -- no one would be terribly surprised by the ending if the review had at all mentioned what atman means. It's one thing if reviewers just miss a cultural quirk but this is a word in the title. Atman as a concept is the basis of a whole group of religions practiced by a substantial chunk of the world's population. Nearly all of which are focused on separating/distinguishing the atman from the physical body.

We have wiki now. We as readers should not be the ones having to use it. This already happened with Samsara Room, where several commenters were completely disconcerted by the ending. I mean, I get that oversights happen, but this gap in essential information is starting to border on culturally insensitive. Take five minutes to look it up and link it back to the game, please, since this is clearly part of what the developer intended. If you cannot explain it yourself, then find someone on this tiny Internet who can before it gets to us.

If anything, if this game had been at all less than brilliant, not setting us up for the ending might have dropped it a mushroom or two. Dropped it out of the year-end awards? Made players pass on it when they might have enjoyed it? If you were a one-person operation, okay, but... This does not serve the developer, the players, or JiG as a ratings-based site.

1. Use top-left green knight to make top-right green into a 2.
2. Use both yellow and top-right green(now a 2) to make middle-right green into a 4.
3. Use middle-right green(4) on monster(4).
4. Use middle-left green(5) on monster(5) to make bottom-left blue into a 6.
5. Use middle-left blue to make bottom-right blue into a 2.
6. Use bottom-right blue(2).
7. Move bottom-left blue thru flame, and kill last monster(8)

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